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Sway: The Pull of Irrational Behavior

Four word summary: People do stupid shit.  Of course, we all know that.  The question is: How much stupid shit do we do, and why do we do so much of it?  Sway, written by a Harvard-MBA-and-shrink team, examines those questions.  The Brafman brothers blame much of our irrational behavior on loss aversion, value attribution, and diagnostic bias.  Loss aversion.  We're are way more afraid of losing than we should be.  How many of us are afraid of losing things that, really, we'd be better off without? Of course, the data says that loss causes us more pain than winning causes us pleasure.  So maybe it's rational to allow loss aversion to guide us. Value attribution.  We tend to stick with your initial value judgments of a person or thing...continue to full post

Full post as published by Crime & Federalism on June 25, 2008 (boomark / email).